Management Maneuvers—RestartShedding Excess Baggage and Restarting the Business

Progress will slow if the current team is weighed down carrying
too many passengers and baggage from the past. When you feel
your company starting to grind to a halt, wouldn’t it be nice to
hit the ‘control-alt-delete’ keys, Shutdown and restart like you
can with your PC? As you
go about your daily business, your PC inadvertently accumulates
tasks and processes that unnecessarily clog up its memory and
processor, slowing everything else down. A good restart cleanses
out all this junk and releases valuable resources for the use of
your new applications. Similarly, in business you sometimes feel
as though you’ve accumulated unwanted shareholders, creditors,
disgruntled employees and all forms of unwanted baggage. Well,
it can be possible to hit ‘control-alt-delete’ a couple of
times, restart your business, shed the excess baggage with the
back-seat passengers and start afresh. However, restarting a
business is not quite as straightforward as restarting your
PC—and if you get it wrong you can find yourself in the state
penitentiary instead of the local PC repair store.

Warm RestartA warm restart is a radical restructuring of the existing
company that boosts momentum and releases valuable resources
without losing customer contracts or other relationships.
Although the maneuver involves sweeping internal changes, they
can be imperceptible to customers and the outside world. The
objective of a warm restart is to give the company a fresh lease
on life without losing any existing market momentum.

Cold Restart
Cold restart is a corporate reincarnation that involves shutting
down the old company, forming a new company and starting over.
The Cold Restart involves killing the old company and performing
a miraculous
reincarnation.
In fact, the reincarnation is not
very miraculous at all—it’s a surprisingly simple legal maneuver
that law firms orchestrate on a regular basis. However,
launching a new company is a difficult and time-consuming
undertaking that involves rebuilding every component of the
business. Restructuring and re-launching the old company,
through a Warm Restart, can be a much less painful way of
achieving a similar result.